ElevenLabs— AI voice synthesis, dubbing, and conversational agents.
ElevenLabs builds AI audio models for lifelike speech synthesis, voice cloning, and multilingual dubbing, delivered through a developer platform, consumer apps, and an enterprise voice-agent stack.
Notable milestones from ElevenLabs’s journey — funding rounds, launches, and other moments worth knowing.
partnership
SynthID watermarks make ElevenLabs audio publicly detectable
ElevenLabs partnered with Google DeepMind to embed SynthID watermarks into generated audio, starting with free Text to Speech users before expanding across all audio generations. The company paired the rollout with a free Audio Detector, making attribution a repeatable provenance check instead of a guess by ear.
The detector checks for SynthID watermarks embedded directly into ElevenLabs-generated audio.
173 planned California hires deepen the US footprint
ElevenLabs committed to hiring 173 people across California in research, engineering, sales and other roles, backed by a California Competes Tax Credit award. The expansion made San Francisco and Los Angeles its primary California hubs while adding state-level work on public-service accessibility and AI-safety efforts.
The Polish government invested in ElevenLabs through Vinci, part of BGK Group, joining investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and ICONIQ. The company paired the stake with AI Lab Poland, a joint initiative to connect capital, technology, science, and Polish AI talent with partners including Centrum e-Zdrowia, LOT Polish Airlines, InPost, and the University of Warsaw.
UK Government MoU brings voice AI into public services
ElevenLabs signed a memorandum of understanding with the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to explore voice AI for public-service accessibility, extend AI security research, and support voice-and-audio AI talent. Alongside the deal, it committed to a new London headquarters three times larger than its old office and to doubling UK headcount to 200.
$500M ARR as enterprise voice agents take over the mix
ElevenLabs said annual recurring revenue crossed $500M in the first four months of 2026, less than a year after it reported $330M for all of 2025. The growth came alongside a third close of its Series D and was driven by enterprise deployment of voice agents across support, sales, hiring and marketing.
$500M Series D at an $11B valuation, with an IPO in view
Sequoia Capital led a $500M round that more than tripled the valuation to $11B, with Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ doubling down and Nvidia among backers. It took total funding past $780M as ElevenLabs leaned into enterprise voice agents and signaled an eventual IPO.
Round
Series D
Raised
$500M
Valuation
$11B
Led by
Sequoia Capital
The February 2026 raise that valued the voice-AI company at $11B.
Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ Growth co-led a $180M round that tripled the valuation to $3.3B in a year, with NEA, Sequoia and Salesforce Ventures joining — funding the push into dubbing studios, audiobooks, and voice agents.
Round
Series C
Raised
$180M
Valuation
$3.3B
Led by
Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ
The team behind the $3.3B company, gathered for a company-wide retreat.
ElevenLabs opened a developer platform for building low-latency voice agents — stitching speech-to-text, an LLM, and its own voices into interactive bots for support, sales, and phone lines. It became the company's enterprise growth engine.
ElevenAgents grew into the company's enterprise platform for voice and conversational AI.
Andreessen Horowitz led an $80M round that vaulted the valuation past $1.1B — a more than tenfold jump in seven months — with Sequoia, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross joining as the voice-AI race accelerated.
AI Dubbing translates a video into 20+ languages — in your own voice
The dubbing tool re-voiced any video or audio across more than 20 languages while preserving the original speaker's voice, tone, and timing — aiming squarely at the cost and latency of human dubbing studios.
Months after launch, Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross co-led a $19M round at roughly a $100M valuation, backing the platform and its new AI Speech Classifier for detecting cloned audio.
Voice cloning goes viral — and instantly controversial
The beta platform let anyone clone a voice from a short sample. It went viral within days; just as quickly, 4chan users cloned celebrities saying vile things, forcing ElevenLabs into an early, public reckoning with voice-AI safeguards.
Two friends from Poland set out to fix bad dubbing
Mati Staniszewski (ex-Palantir) and Piotr Dąbkowski (ex-Google ML engineer), who grew up together in Poland, founded ElevenLabs after years of watching American films butchered by lifeless dubbing — betting they could make synthetic speech sound genuinely human.